


The Skies'll Be Blue

by Major



Series: The Way Home [5]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Action, Drama, Fluff, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 13:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9493709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: Climbing into a water tower seems like a much better idea before they're actually inside it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song 'Happy Together' by The Turtles.

Aaron’s dreams were echoes of Abraham and Glenn, Spencer, Olivia, and feeling his ribs threaten to break with each kick he took. Violence was pervasive. It was fire in his memory and burned long after it was over.

He woke up during their last night on the Hilltop, didn’t gasp or jolt, but felt Eric stir beside him anyway. Eric was that way, knowing when Aaron needed him without having to be told.

“What do you need?” he murmured, hand reaching out in the darkness and tracing light lines and warm fingertips over his arm.

He needed the world to make sense again. He remembered his life before it became this thing, this endless walk down a dangerous road with a boogeyman behind every shadow. Remembered rallies and protests, peace marches and picket signs: Peace Not War, Stop the Violence. It was all so ridiculous now. They couldn’t stop violence. That was all the world was. Violence against the innocent, violence to defend the innocent, violence to survive. It didn’t stop. It would burn forever.

He rolled onto his side, curling against Eric's chest under the comforting weight of his arm around his shoulders. The world was broken, but they still made sense, him and Eric. It was enough to keep the fire back.

They started out early the next morning, following the railroad tracks for a sweep near the Hilltop, a short run to look for something in payment for the kindness and help they received there, especially from Dr. Carson.

The railway stretched on for miles, curving far ahead but extending in a straight line that would take them a while to cross. It was a bright day. They had their jackets, but they didn’t need them. The wind was cool, but the chill of winter was abating. The sky was covered in drifting white clouds that tried to hide the worst of what was out there behind bright blues and rustling grass. Aaron knew better.

“A ladybug,” he guessed as he tried to stick to the wooden planks between the rails for easier walking. They started playing I Spy a mile back. His clue was: alive.

Eric was behind him, arms stretched out at his sides, trying to balance on one of the rails. “Nope.”

Aaron glanced back at him, paying close attention to his leg. It was his first time putting its endurance to the test, and he was ready to turn back around at the first sign of fatigue.

It wasn’t an ant, a spider, a beetle, bee, worm, dragonfly, regular fly, or a ladybug. “I give up. What was it?”

“A gorilla.”

Aaron stopped walking and spun around, sneakers crunching the gravel between the boards. “What? You spied a _gorilla_ out here?”

“No.” Eric shrugged and almost teetered off the rail as he kept walking towards him. “Everything out here is boring, so I made up whatever I wanted.”

Eric’s loose relationship with rules was bordering on complete infidelity at this point. The mind boggled.

“That’s not I Spy. That’s 20 Questions. I should have been able to interrogate you, so I would’ve gotten closer to gorilla than a housefly. This is why I don’t like playing games with you.”

“Because you always lose?”

“I always lose, because you cheat at everything we play!” He started walking beside him again when he caught up.

“It’s not cheating. I just have stylistic preferences about the truth that differ from yours.”

His eyebrows shot up. “That is a truly remarkable amount of bullshit. How do you carry so much bullshit with you? You’re not supposed to be putting stress on your leg, remember?”

“It’s contractible.”

Aaron snorted and pushed him off the rail. They both looked up as he caught himself and glimpsed the water tower poking up through the trees. They glanced at each other and abandoned the tracks, starting through the trees for it. By the time they reached it, words in black paint came into focus on the side of the tower over the old original logo. It said: Kimmy supplies inside!

It was as close to an X marking the spot as they were likely to get. Considering, the tower was at least 110 feet high and the person who left the message had taken a hell of a risk painting the side to make sure Kimmy saw it, there was at least a moderate chance of finding actual gold.

“What do you say, Kimmy?” Eric asked.

“I say it’s a long way up.” He jerked his chin towards his recently healed injury. “Can your leg take it?”

“Leg is fine.” He started for the ladder. “Besides, if it starts hurting, I can always just light one up.”

That was not happening. “You are not smoking pot outside the walls. The hardest thing you’re taking is an aspirin. You better not have even brought any.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m serious.”

Eric ignored him, and he decided to check his bag as soon as they were done.

Looking straight up from the bottom of the ladder reminded him that it wasn't just people and the dead that could kill them. Falling from that height would do a good job of mangling them with only a misstep and gravity doing the dirty work of knocking them off.

“Rock-paper-scissors, who goes first?” Eric offered.

Aaron complied, two fingers spread apart in an imitation of scissors, but stared quizzically at Eric’s fingers, pointed upwards and wiggling. “What is that?”

“It’s hellfire. It burns your paper, melts your scissors, and disintegrates your rock.”

Aaron locked eyes with him for a long moment, but it wasn’t worth it. The sheer weight of his bullshit was going to knock him off the ladder halfway up. He readjusted his bag, got a foot up on the first rung and started up.

They made it to the top, and vertigo flipped his stomach when he made the mistake of looking down. Eric was a lot easier about it, leaning over the safety rail and peering down like he was a foot off the ground and not one false step away from becoming jam in the grass below.

“How’s the leg?” he asked.

Eric shot him an exasperated look. “Still attached to my body. How’s yours?”

Aaron raised his hands in surrender. He wasn’t a helicopter boyfriend, despite the accusatory looks, so he wouldn’t ask again. Today.

They climbed over to the manhole at the top and after some rusty sounding creaks, got it twisted and open. Flashlights came out of their packs, and it wasn’t a thrilling view.

The tower was only about half full. At least 125,000 gallons of water sat still inside the reservoir a long way down. There was a metal walkway that encircled the perimeter of the interior and led to two doors on opposite sides to the pump station below. The part directly over the manhole was broken and submerged in water. Sun streaming down from the hatch pried the blackest corners into shadowy light.

Eric pat his arm and pointed at the farthest plank of the catwalk on the right. “Treasure chest.”

There was a mound of supplies sitting untouched: bags, a couple of boxes and crates with unidentifiable cans or bottles from that distance. Still, it was a long way down and a long way back up.

“We climbed to the sky for a look,” Eric prodded, sensing his hesitation. “We should look. I’m looking.”

Aaron frowned, but they had to do it. With Negan depleting the stashes of every other camp, every little bit helped nowadays. He nodded.

“Rock-paper-scissors, who goes first?”

“Save your hellfire.” Aaron pushed him out of the way and readjusted his pack before turning around and carefully stepping down onto the interior ladder to make the descent. “Be careful,” he warned before he lowered himself enough to duck his head inside the tower.

“Go slow.”

Eric started down over him, and Aaron’s eyes flicked upwards. He was being ginger with his left leg, but he held his tongue and concentrated on getting down.

“I spy,” he joked, and his voice echoed loudly with a tinny reverberation, “something alive.”

“Me,” Eric guessed, a few rungs up.

“No. A pterodactyl. See how annoying that is?”

Their laughter bounced off the walls.

Aaron was hoping there was some food in one of those packs that would have kept well, letting his imagination wander to cans of pumpkin pie filling or jars of crunchy peanut butter. He was picturing a creamy, peanut-y sandwich when his foot caught a broken rung, went through it as he was lowering his hand, and he lost his grip.

His heart leapt in his throat as he fell twenty feet short of reaching the bottom.

“Aaron!”

His back hit water and knocked the air out of him as he went under. The little bit of light from above vanished below the surface, and he sunk into black depths. His flashlight hit the water and drifted, beam cutting a streak through the darkness a few feet away. Another splash shook him out of it, and he kicked for the surface.

The strap of his pack was still around his shoulders when he shook his head out of the water and gasped in air.

Eric spun around in the water where he’d jumped, and tension rolled out of him at the sight of him bobbing there, eyes closing momentarily. “You scared the shit out of me. Didn’t I tell you to go slow?”

“I’m sorry,” Aaron said, swimming over with a small smile at the putout look on Eric’s face, like he had decided to put his foot through the rung and freefall to the black water below.

They swam to the side of the walkway that was still above water with the supplies at the end of it and tossed their bags up onto the dry platform. Eric got a grip on it and started to lift himself up onto it, but Aaron caught him by the waist and pulled him back down. He had time to cast him a puzzled look before Aaron pressed his lips to his and pushed him against the walkway, fingers sliding up into the wet tendrils of his hair. The kiss muffled the surprised noise he made before Eric’s arms went around his neck, and he kissed him back, hard and messy.

Aaron’s heart was still thudding from the fall, but the feel of Eric’s slim body against his own, legs tangled and kicking together, brought the speed to a crescendo. He missed this. Missed feeling safe when they were close, unworried about a horde or a barbed wire bat—just the two of them, Eric’s lips on his throat, and a bruising hand on his hip as he drew him tight against him and held firm. The world had turned to bullet holes and graves. It was better like this, enclosed, Eric’s teeth on his wet skin and the heat of him chasing off the cold that seeped into everything, fear and hopelessness that chilled through every layer.

When the world was reduced to Eric, it was somehow bigger than the open fields and endless roads they walked. It was easier to find freedom nowadays in an old abandoned dome.

Eric broke away from Aaron’s fevered lips, confusion stealing over him.

“Aaron, are you—?”

His eyes went wide, and he was yanked below the surface with a cutoff gasp.

“Eric!”

He was pulled from the illusion of safety and back into the violence.

Ducking under the water, he swam down, squinting through the dark. Their two flashlight beams at the bottom of the tank lit the outlines of the chaos. Eric was reaching up with outstretched arms, trying to grab for anything that could pull him free as he kicked hard to get loose. There was a walker caught on the broken stretch of caved in walkway, impaled on a long piece of jagged metal railing. Her long blonde hair was floating out from a loose scalp, body bloated from being submerged so long. Her teeth snapped for Eric as her hand gripped his ankle, broken fingernails sticking out at all angles.

Bubbles streamed out as Eric screamed underwater in his panic to get away.

Aaron got eye level with her and punched her in the face. Her skull jostled, but she didn’t let go or weaken her grip with a second blow. Aaron pat his waist blindly until he got a grip on the handle of his knife and tugged it free from its holster. Her jaw flexed for him, scraggly fingers webbed out as she clawed for him. She got hold of his arm, but he struggled, kicking and pulling away until he got a good angle.

She yanked him close, and he struck. The knife went through her eye socket and jammed firmly into her brain. Her hands went loose. Dead arms floated harmlessly to her sides. He got his knife free and kicked up, giving Eric a push, and gasping in unison as they broke through the surface. This time they didn’t waste any time getting to the walkway.

Eric got there first, and Aaron gave him a boost up and out of the water, following after. They laid sprawled on the narrow metal surface until they could breathe again without their hearts pounding.

Typical day at the end of the world. Nowhere was safe. It was his fault for letting himself forget that. Even a second of enjoying the illusion of safety was enough to take someone out.

“Nothing like getting cockblocked by a dead girl.” He turned his head to look at Eric who looked entirely done with the day and the tower.

“More like cockpaused,” he promised, and they both smiled. “Think we just met Kimmy? Charming girl. A little handsy. She’ll be really embarrassed when she finds out I’m gay.”

“You’re gay?!”

Eric chuckled as he rolled over and got to his knees. Aaron stood up and offered his hand, hoisting him to his feet and making their way over to the loot they risked their lives for. They knelt down in front of it and started digging through it.

“This tower is old,” Eric commented as Aaron discovered no peanut butter but a whole crate of soups. “Really outdated. Maybe the group that left the supplies was trying to get it working again.”

Possibly. “Or escaping a horde. Not a bad place to hide.”

Kimmy aside, it was impenetrable to walkers on the ground.

Eric pulled a toilet paper pack free from a duffel bag and sifted around underneath it. “Until the roamers evolve and start climbing. That’ll be fun.”

There would go the entire usefulness of the walls. He stopped believing that things couldn’t get worse. Things could always get worse. “Don’t jinx it.”

They made out like bandits: food, toiletries, blankets, winter-wear, soap, and most importantly, an entire backpack full of medicines and bandages. They would split half of that with Dr. Carson in thank you, leave anything Maggie might need for her pregnancy, and haul the rest back to Alexandria with them to be distributed in the community.

It took much longer to get all of it down than it took to climb up there to begin with. They shut the manhole on their last trip, always avoiding that broken rung.

(”Go slow this time.”

“I am going slow.”

“ _Slower_.”

Eric could do his own share of helicopter-boyfriending.)

The sun was starting to set, and they lingered up top, staring out at the treetops and the strip of filtered orange and purple being pushed down by a darkening sky. The world shrank down to just the two of them again, and he could forget for a while that it was much bigger and scarier. Eric leaned his head against his shoulder, and they watched night come on from 100 feet above the reality of the world below.

Sometimes the world was just Eric, and he remembered why it was worth fighting for.


End file.
